Experimental film.

I’m no film buff by any standard. I hold close company with quite a few good friends who are either in love with, or involved with the film industry in Ireland. Friends range from passing interest to full blown career. So much so that I was dragged to went willingly to the Galway Film Fleadh. On first account, this seems a preposterous notion. I’ve seen about 3 films in the last 12 months in the cinema. Anything else I probably saw via illegal manner, and fell asleep before anything finished. I’m a music fan, and unashamedly so, so while I do enjoy a good film, I prefer to see what I want to see, rather then what’s been recommended to me (though often that involves quite a bit of crossover).

Galway was amazing. As my first fleadh, or film festival in general, I was blown away. It wasn’t pompous. There was very little douchebaggery and the films we saw blew my mind. I loved Toy Story 3 as much as the next man/woman/child, but I saw it with the director/producer/writer sitting 3 rows behind me. I’m basically a movie star already. I couldn’t give a toss if bee’s die. I wish they did years ago so Jerry Seinfeld didn’t write a shit film about them. But the Irish produced documentary “Colony” (not to be read as “colon y”) was actually brilliant. And the best domestic film I’ve ever seen will blow everyone’s mind when it gets a general release – The Runway. Not about attractive models, as it turns out. It’s about an aircraft crash in west Chark, bhay.

There was also a huge programme of short films. Sounds terrible. But this was a remarkable display of talent. Mostly, it seemed, young talent, who have a great shot of emerging from the depths of Sony handicams in rural Ireland to become proper big-boy film makers. To celebrate the award-winning ones, Dublin’s filmbase and the Lighthouse cinema showed each winning short yesterday. A good way to spend two Sunday hours.

After this, the plan was to go get some sushi in a place I hadn’t eaten in before, but was informed would be awesome. Then, we would sip wine and perhaps visit the tea gardens on the quays to drink whiskey tea (what else?) and have a strawberry hookah. A lovely plan. But time slipped by at the free wine reception in the Lighthouse cinema. A lot of time slipped by. And a lot of wine slipped into our stomachs. So, pressed for this precious time we had lovely burgers and headed to our next cinematic engagement. An experimental night of, eh, experimental cinema.

I said I like music. I really do. I listen to it for hours everyday. My iPod is probably the one product I own that I would literally lose myself if it were to die or go missing. I listen to everything. Even experimental music. And while, sure, it’s often not coherent enough to become popular, it is interesting enough to listen to and enjoy the talent on show. Even Chopin wrote some awful drivel, but you could listen to it for hours and enjoy how he whizzes his fingers up and down his ivory toolkit.

I’ve never listened to music that was so “experimental” that it offended me. So, reluctantly I went along to this free event of experimental cinema, which was put on as part of a programme of experimental cinema in Dublin to showcase film makers who create pieces without the constraints of scripts.

Count me offended. I’m still incredibly angry about seeing this. It appears cinema might just benefit from having scripts, and perhaps those constraints aren’t so much tying film makers down – but helping them tell a story, or at the very least give them a way to portray a message or idea. This, my friends, was not an example of talent. Not even mish-mashed, well documented cinematic experiences. No, this was all awful. It felt like it was filmed by an 11 year old child who just got his first camera and enjoys eating feces while performing experiments on worms.

The 85 minutes were broken up into several short films. I say short, because the length of time they went on for was short in the sense that they only took 15-20 minutes each. But measuring it in a more quantic manner would have you believe you were going to die of old age at any second. This feeling crept up half way through the first short. Which was about 7 minutes long, and featured 8mm footage of nothing. Literally. Panning up and down with red filters turning on/off repeatedly to the sound of what Tool (the band) would call “an interlude”. This, after 10 minutes of pandering with “technical issues” with the DVD. How the hell do you have “technical issues” with a DVD inside a computer hooked directly to a projector? It’s 2010.

The first piece was so mind numbing, it was obviously the film maker just introducing his off-kilter style before getting into some nitty gritty. Maybe some dialogue, or even people, would follow. But no. Same again. A blue filter featured this time. He’s been honing his “filtering” skills quite a bit, it seems. We see a lot of the sky, to the soundtrack of what sounded like a stick being forcefully strune along a steel fence. I’m sure he thought it was exposing our minds to deep, deep thoughts and awful inner psyche expose. But really, it was just the cinematic equivalent of urine.

I mentioned the film maker. He goes under a monicker MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN that that I won’t embarrass him with by announcing here. He had the physique of Kevin Smith and appeared to enjoy his films while stroking his randomly assorted facial hair like some sort of PHD in “thoughts”. Clearly, I was in awe of his genius and my anger at his work being exhibited in public was just me exposing my deep seated jealousy.

The third piece featured a woman. An actual actor. This was our first real expose of his style. Randomly editing static and colours into his work while playing audio from movies in the 20s/30s which he either stole or has gone out of copyright. The actress is probably very good, but her portrail of some mad bitch rubbing down a fireplace didn’t really say much to me. Though perhaps exposed Max’s (I’m sure he won’t mind me calling him that) penchant for gaping wide holes in rooms. Like the one that appeared in the venue after this piece when about 10% of the people (which is 1 person) left. Let’s not forget the incredibly emotive part of this film, when for 3 minutes there was just a black screen. And no, it wasn’t a technical hitch!

However bad that was, the fourth piece was a doozey. Lights and sounds flickered on and off the screen with absolute randomness. Nothing was being attempted here, except that Maxey had obviously just learned the cut/paste tool in iMovie. Not only that, getting his ginger friend (in glasses and a black coat to look poetic) to whistle over the piece was so emotive it brought me to tears. Either that, or the realisation that I could have been eating sushi while drinking wine and looking forward to tea slowly crept up on me.

Not only was number four a doozey, but in the last 60 seconds another technical hitch occurred. I have a theory as to why this difficult technology (DVD’s) was being so harsh to Maximum. You see, this kind of cinema was filled with such utter lack of talent – and I mean so little talent that he makes Busted look like the kind of band who needed to win the Mercury music prize – that I get the feeling MaxFactor is the kind of guy who prefers to touch himself then have sex because he thinks he’s so talented. He’s the kind of person who looks at himself naked and thinks “oh wow, that’s clearly Jesus in my belly button”. These technical hitches meant that we had to re-watch film number four. At least it gave the crowd time to look at the piece with more introspective mannerisms leave.

Film number five was amazing. Like I said, I’m no film maker. But I have seen films. A lot of great, Irish films – some of which were shot on very little budget but thanks to technology developed in the 90s can be made look good on a big screen. But here, on a medium screen, the film making was awful. In this piece, we look out a window. Either the shot was badly out of focus, or my eyes were voluntarily making themselves go blind to stop the pain of seeing the man in a bathroom do nothing, interlaced with shots of the sky & awful 70s porn. Oh, and there was a Teddy Bear, indicating our spectacled friend from the whistling bit is some sort of toilet paedophile who likes the company of bears. Paedo bears.

We then see a dog on a field. It’s actually the first shot that’s framed well. Behind the dog, which is the best actor so far in the first hour of drivel, there’s a boat coming into harbour. I’m taking this as a metaphor with the interlaced close-up shots of 70s porn.

The guy’s signature move is interlacing old movie bits and audio into random pieces of awfulness. But MaxiPad took the biscuit when he had a girl thoughtfully looking out the window. White-washed thanks to the over exposure. Which is fine. Except he changes the exposure. Mid-shot. Over, and over again. Not even smoothly. It’s like he had just found the button for the first time and decided it needed an audience. This was during a 20 minute sequence of utter rubbish featuring an actress screwing up lines and a rapey-looking bald man “editing” on a clearly turned off Macbook (the logo was on in one bit, then turned off mid-shot, and never came back on).

We then, with about 3 others, left the building before tearing our own eyes out. I went for a stiff drink, but the displeasure of seeing such tripe hasn’t left me. So much so that I’ve written a blog post for the first time in a month. That’s how incensed I am. It’s not that he’s a shit film maker. It’s not even that he think’s he’s fantastic – it’s just that he got an audience to display this and I know that there are so many talented, young and eager film makers in Ireland today who are struggling to get an audience. The only thing that could possibly make this worse is knowing that any of my tax paying money went into TK Maxx’s work in any way, shape — oh, dear, god.